blogs

We all know that the traditional media outlets often provide biased coverage of Africa, if at all. So where do you go if you want to get a more nuanced picture of the continent?

Blogs, of course.

Some of my recommendations on where to get started:

• African Path: The uber-blog for African news, featuring some of the top bloggers and writers from across the continent. Sign up to their mailing list to receive regular updates.
• Global Voices Sub-Saharan Africa coverage - the BEST place to get an introduction to the range of bloggers in Africa.
• Afrigator: an aggregator of African blogs.
• Blog Africa: another aggregator of African blogs.
• African Women Blogs: an aggregator focusing specifically on women bloggers.

An article on the BBC website has revealed that several Iraqi bloggers have been forced to leave the country. A few have left out their own will citing the increasing violence as the motivating factor.

Here is a list of some of the bloggers:

• City called Hell - Where date palms grow - daily account of a personal vision of Bagdhad
• Neurotic Iraqi Wife - Newlywed works and lives in Bagdhads Green Zone and blogs about her every day life.
  
• Nabils Blog - 19year old Iraqui Nablis blogs from Jordan.
• Days of My Life - "Talk about daily life of a teenage girl in Iraq, and days of suffer and success. My nick name will be Sunshine."
• A Star from Mosul - 19 year old student "Aunt Najma" from Mosul blogs about her life in Iraq, family holidays and her first year in university.
• Last of Iraqis - 25 years old dentist lives in Baghdad and is afraid that Iraqis are going to extinct soon. "so I made this blog wishing that I can make a difference or even share my grief with the whole world and give them an idea about what's happening here from the point of view of a civilian living in the war zone not from the politicians nor people who gets their benefits from the conditions."
• 24 Steps to Liberty - Iraqi student of journalism blogs from Berkeley, California.

Follow these brave bloggers and read about the reaction of the military regime in Burma at Times online:

"Armed with small digital cameras, they have documented the spectacular growth of the demonstrations from crowds of a few hundred to as many as 100,000. On weblogs they have recorded in words and pictures the regime’s bloody crackdown, in a city where only a handful of foreign journalists work undercover. With downloaded software, they have dodged and weaved around the regime’s increasingly desperate attempts to thwart their work. Now the bloggers, too, have been crushed. Having failed to stop the cyber-dissidents broadcasting to the world, the authorities have simply switched off the internet.

Now Ko Latt and his blogging comrades have abandoned their keyboards and gone underground, sleeping in a different place every night, watching and waiting to see if the democracy movement has been truly crushed or is simply on hold. “When things were hot on the streets, we were not the main worry,” Ko Latt says. “But as the situation cools down, they will follow us. They know who we are, they know we are bloggers, and I am afraid.”"

Follow Burmese bloggers and their resistance in Ko Htike's blog as well as on Burmese Bloggers without Borders.

(Picture taken by racoles.)

Worldchanging.com's Emily Gertz discusses the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of blogs and mobile phones, referring to recent events in Burma and an activist project in Congo, among other things:

"In the world of online activism, expectations have not inflated to the level of a few years ago, when a wave of techno-utopian optimism swept the activist 'net that maybe a "technical intervention," that is blogging, could stop the mass killings in Darfur -- an effort which, on those terms, failed.

Still, could another such "failure," fueled by the dismay and anger about the Myanmar government's violent crackdown, undercut the momentum of mobile-enabled activism? It's a good moment to consider how networked communications don't -- and do -- help achieve human rights."

Link to full post.

Their books both started a global debate around free market politics,
especially in the context of the Blackwater shooting in Iraq earlier
this month. Both books are high priority publications this year and
both writers are highly discussed these weeks: But what do bloggers
think about Alan Greenspan's and Naomi Klein's latest work?